Writing the New Ethnography
Writing Ethnography is the material, textual manifestation of a long and complex process of my becoming a writer, a process I am still actively engaged in. Its ethnographic slant has been fashioned by a way of working, a way of entering the world everyday, which privileges asking questions about Others in cultural contexts constructed and understood by a self whose presence is very much in the text. Dan Rose calls this process "living the ethnographic life" (1990), but mostly I just think of it as becoming who I am.
For me, ethnographic fieldwork and the writing that comes of it is less a formal method of inquiry than it is a disciplined attitude and conversational style that I have learned to make into a way of life. In this way, I am fortunate. Universities have paid me to live this way. Many colleagues and students, and in some cases the public, have read and responded passionately to my writing. I have had the personal satisfaction of having "been there" at the front of the interpretive turn in Communication Studies, and now have fine memories of the persons and conversations that made that turn possible. (read more)
Available at Amazon.com
